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Brooklyn Bridge Memory Theater
| Article
# : |
11468 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
1,935 Words |
| Author
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Ron Cowen
Ron Cowen is a free-lance science writer who resides in Takoma
Park, Maryland. |
Noontime on a brilliant summer day in lower Manhattan - a visitor's steps quicken as he leaves the skyscrapers behind and heads toward the river. Weaving through the traffic near City Hall and dodging bicyclists on the sloping concrete path, he finally reaches the wooden planked walkway atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Ten feet above the stop-and-go pulse of cars, crisscrossing cables of silver-gray frame harbor boats and the skyline with an ever-changing pattern of trapezoids.
If the bridge resembles a 3-D wire sculpture from the outside, the soaring, cavernous space inside its granite support pillars also inspires comparison with a work of art. Walk inside the thick-walled pillar or anchorage on the Brooklyn shore and seven mysterious vaulted chambers, replete with 55-foot ceilings, greet the visitor. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington more than a century ago to house and support the bridge's suspension cables, the Brooklyn anchorage this summer was the site and inspiration for a theater performance that may be one of the closest collaborations ever between building structure and art.
For playwright Matthew Maguire, the adventure began in 1984, a year after the City of New York restored the space - it had become a warehouse for used tires - to its original grandeur in honor of the bridge's centennial. Maguire had already decided t write about a play about Guilio Camillo, an Italian Renaissance philosopher and mystic who was obsessed with human memory. When he saw the anchorage, Maguire was hooked. "I walked in and thought the place was perfect for a play about memory - all the chambers suggest the reverence of memory."
With the
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